Shamanspace Read online

  ‘Steve Aylett is without doubt one of the most ambitious and talented writers to emerge in England in recent years. While his work echoes the best of William Burroughs, it has the mark of real originality. It’s hip, cool and eloquent.’

  Michael Moorcock

  ‘Aylett is one of the great eccentrics of British genre fiction.’

  The Guardian

  ‘Aylett’s prose is like poetry.’

  The Independent

  ‘Utterly original’

  SFX

  ‘The most original and most consciousness-altering living writer in the English language, not to mention one of the funniest.’

  Alan Moore

  Steve Aylett was born in London in 1967. He is the author of The Crime Studio, Atom, Bigot Hall, Fain the Sorcerer, Slaughtermatic, Rebel at the End of Time, Toxicology, Shamanspace, Smithereens and Novahead – all of which are available via the Serif Books website. His work has been translated into Spanish, German, French, Greek, Finnish, Czech, Russian and Japanese. He is a bitter man.

  www.steveaylett.com

  SHAMANSPACE

  by Steve Aylett

  Serif

  London

  This e-book first published 2015 by

  Serif

  47 Strahan Road

  London E3 5DA

  www.serifbooks.co.uk

  Copyright © Steve Aylett 2001, 2015

  Illustrations and pictures copyright © Steve Aylett 2001, 2015

  e-book edition copyright © Serif 2015

  First published 2001 by Codex Books

  Steve Aylett has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work.

  ISBN: 978 1 909150 38 6

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, transmitted or stored in a retrieval system, in any form or by any means, without prior permission in writing from the publishers

  e-book produced by Will Dady

  Caught by mortals in old age,

  an angel scattered itself like leaves

  SIG

  To those who know that the inhabitants of heaven and hell are political prisoners, that the law is as preventative as next year’s weather, that the post-human’s too predictable, South London has always been a playground.

  ‘Don’t think so hard—he’ll hear you, if he’s bothered.’

  Young and deathblown, two edgemen walked past stripe walls, blending so there were walls, nobody. The pavement didn’t recognise them, drawing no colour.

  The younger, the boy, tipped his head back in a bone-flavour rain, seeing air rich in nocturnal swirls.

  ‘What about you?’

  ‘He won’t know I’m here,’ the French girl told him. ‘He never knows.’

  ‘You must be good,’ said the boy—if she could screen from Alix. They said Alix could enter the face of a guitar without making a sound. Melody had once seen his body splitting open as he bleached out behind geysers of infra-red, lightning in the blot of his mouth and angel blowback gusting stuff off the breakfast table. And as he reversed out of the human bandwidth he pulled depths into the house, furniture exploding into blurdust and splinters. He could lose it across to otherspace as soon as think about it. He stared and it was hell that blinked. Back at the Keep Alix featured in heavy books, his icon head in colours kitsch as Indian firework art.

  She said they were near but the boy couldn’t feel anything strange in the trafficjam of structures. He ran his hand along a pedestrian subway’s paracetamol walls as they ascended into an angled wasteland where a traffic light hung like an earring. Melody was now a more stripped-down version of herself, invisible to anyone but the best edgemen—Sig saw a flicker of her wrapped in protein mapping. They said he had the gift but no brains. Bad steering.

  Mood rang across the slamming abandoned street. They stopped at a metal door covered in rust like coffee grains. Alix’s door and still no energy signature. They valved through, and the boy found himself clattering up the dodgy stairs alone. Glancing back, he saw the girl had sat down sadly to wait.

  Sig pushed carefully into the dim room. It was as cold as stone and became slowly a distinct space of callused books and abraxia. Everywhere softening, withered and dead flowers were arrayed in the gloom. Seated near the hollow fire of this dry worry shrine was Alix in clowntorn rags faded to a pupal grey. How old was he meant to be? Twenty-seven? But his hair was white, his face empty. Not cloaked—just not giving out any energy to start with. Was it a new, deeper sort of disguise? Living right down in the detail?

  His eyes were turns of liquid gold, glistening and unseeing.

  ‘What’s this,’ said the living legend without looking up, his voice that of an old man. ‘A little novice godstopper, ripped to the tits on righteous fury.’

  ‘I like to think so, sir.’

  The eye-gold shifted, meaningless. ‘Well answered. I had a dream just now. Bomb season rushed in, flinging back loose particles of the house, blew bodies into me like leaves. Then you swanned in. You and your neurotrash friends getting on alright? Teaching you to field-strip and reassemble yourself like a gun? Watch yourself. You think being permitted is the same as being free? You’re allowed to siddown.’

  Sig pulled a wooden chair over and sat down, staring in silence past Alix at a bug which jotted across the wall.

  ‘D’you like stories? They say our enemy likes stories and that’s why we’re here. Well we haven’t provided it with anything interesting lately have we.’

  ‘I’ve heard a lot of stories about you, Alix.’

  ‘So you drop by to sip my ghost. Like I’ve plenty to spare, the hero. Expected a couple hundredweight of angels entertaining me? Established to heroic glory in a Sistene scene, right?’

  ‘I don’t know what I expected.’

  ‘You’re lying. Or the next thing over. Lying still reveals stuff because it’s directly connected, they haven’t taught you that? I used to be that way—all of six years ago. Thought truth was the stone in the snowball. Truth was really the whole shebang.’

  ‘Tell me.’

  ‘It’s a secret no matter how much it’s told. Our enemy hides in plain sight. I believe you already know that.’

  ‘But you found its heart.’

  ‘I got the coordinates, in the shabbiest way. And I went there. Jabbing a dagger at the sky. You think it’s cool, making me remember? Good for your rep out there? We’re white minutes, disposable ghosts, many per hand. We’re nothing.’

  Sudden pockets of failure went geomantic, flashed into expression, twisting the moment through the room. He had abruptly opened his pain. Sig saw Alix journeying in the big huge, an electron speck on electric white.

  ‘Yeah, it’s a little bit triggery,’ Alix said. ‘I mean it. Into every word I weave thorns.’

  1 CHAOS PAD

  Darkness turns on a dime

  The girl was surgeon and singing bird, deadly queen of sharps. Resentments at the ready, we met in a nerve storm club. I went in as an untextured nobody, walls showing through me. Scar incarnate, third generation cool and moral omitted, washing one drug down with another as the world toxified around us. Sad shadows in her hair, a slow ballet of cigarette smoke, cold bottle touch going warm as outcome diagrams traced our way. The streets, treasure lights bobbing underneath the real. Her rough ferrous oxide tongue as we went up in a cage elevator somewhere. Her hair hides the phone.

  After that I lost track of time for a while. Someone’s flat. I was looking at a strange box of bone parts, all hoaxed up with operation wire—an october switch, it was called. I had one of those, it was an activan machine. A what? My head frazzled through a series of pulls, releases and dissolves. The body is King on Earth, I remembered, a vital lie.

  A lig
htbulb was swinging like a hanged ghost as I drew a thin blade through the smudged centre of the entry stamp on my wrist. The wound pulled open, stretching gluey blood. It looked like a mainline station in there, parallel tracks converging and splitting in a soak of red light. Who was I?

  The elemental flutter of etheric draw flickered in the soda blackness to my right, barely visible through brain spuff. Outside influence, drawing like silver stage ropes.

  I was in such a bad way. Deep cover—I’d lost myself in it again. I was Alix the ultravivid hero or something like it. I stood up, pushing through thick space, and pull patterns shrivelled like cobwebs around me. The girl was a loft baby, rigged up in a back room, the leather cocoon of her flightbag the centre of a massive kirlian web. Transformation adjustments mashed in the dark, heroine wear backing up, discovered and obliged to die. I had to do a techie before the end. Etheric strands were still trailing into me—all the better.

  I used the blade to split the suspension bag—lengths of gelatinous activan stretched from her pale face, she didn’t stir. Laying on hands.

  An armchair was already dwindling into the corner as electrovistas opened up in front, the stream of cells blowing past. Bloodshot intervals of subterranean transport and the racket of magic.

  Her head was a lovely little number. Creation-fresh, her spirit entering a litter of fallen winter, momentary people reproached her angrily for delicious visions and she died a notch or two. Together the years conspired, denying eachother. Fame admiration trapped the family, their lives in dry dock. Children were plucked like pillows and shoved into formation. Surgeons hand over a mistake, culture paints leaves green which were green, complete and repeated, sickening, and mother birds drop coins into the waiting mouths of chicks. She learnt to keep her eyes closed when crying, tears flowing under the skin and over the skull. Early dreams collapsed like empires. At least there was little chance of her rage dying among the lies. Truthful and ousted, she saw structures in events, sat in crowds watching the armatures of human need and fantasy angle-poising between the people, linking them in a jagged scaffold, and later learnt that others couldn’t see this. Bloodshot canyons of wounds, ward screeches, remote money, a cell padded with snow, a white girl curled round a white soul.

  And the Prevail picked her out of the chorus. New fathers taught her to use a sigil gun and walk with street-sensitive claws. Something of herself was left, a miniscule mischief which rifled a secret and took it away. Sacred telemetry. And this rushed into me the instant before her head jumped apart like a balloon filled with water.

  The left side of my body was on fire and I was shaking with sobs, several layers of skin gone. She’d been achingly, corrosively beautiful under the make-up. People who’ve had a lot of good luck deny that luck exists—those who’ve had a lot of bad know it does.

  2 THE SWEET HALFWAY

  Inconsistencies are shown to be limbs on the same creature

  The Internecine pulled me in immediately, my headshout summoning a unit before the Prevail swung by in response to the girl’s phonecall. I was ghostburnt, in mourning and voiding lumps of the cover personality.

  After a few days in my cell at the Keep, I went to see Lockhart in his study, a room tumoured with statuary and patched with a lot of detail. Chairs of red leather polished like cherry skin, floors of heart pine, fruit hugged in a bowl and a fire the colour of drugs. Here we sat and talked in the utter sadness and treasuring of golden mischief which came of knowing it was all for nothing. The Keepworks cloaking system rendered everything ironic instantly; and all the while we meant it.

  ‘You know this bit of barefaced enlightenment could have smashed the neighbourhood?’ Lockhart said, his face full of the vitality of old wisdom. Misery glows better with fibres of experience.

  ‘I got sloppy, then lucked out—that’s all.’ I was healthier. Matter felt right. ‘Where’s Melody?’

  ‘Paris, sidebanding the Prevail motherhouse. She sends her congratulations. She was interested to hear the Prevail have located the heart of god and this assassin girl of theirs happened to know about it. So you’re to do the job.’

  ‘Looks that way, doesn’t it? Slingshot into the monster’s eye. Why shouldn’t it be me. A crack in the furnace may be fiercer than the mouth.’

  ‘Quite. But I’ve been wondering, if the Prevail have the location, why haven’t they carried out the hit?’

  ‘They’re limousine rebels. Riddles retreat, if they’re weak. This one keeps staring until they look away.’

  ‘We don’t. You don’t. You’re getting faster. If anything you’re overconfident. We bleed outside the history books, Alix. However tempting to scorn through victory and leave it wrapped in whispers. Don’t become so attached to your rep that you delay the final act forever. Allow for etheric wind-sheer—and that of cowardice.’

  ‘What the hell does that mean.’

  Lockhart’s face congested with concern. ‘People, unlike our target, can give way to pity. I believe the Prevail feel something like that. Individual versus society, or versus god. Either way it’s the resistance to absorption. Independence of spirit. Pause any country and you’ll spot subliminal torture in the frame. The sky of culture looks downward, obstructive and unambitious. The edgemen are a circus of parallel citizenry. So we sometimes forget the pain that drove us here in the first place.’

  ‘God, camouflaged by sheer familiarity, different to nothing, essence of agony.’ This was re-examined rote, out of an old but good edgemen book called The Ultimate Midnight.

  ‘The debate is: Destroy the universe entire? Or cut god out like a cancer? We in the Internecine believe that in destroying god, we’ll bring everything to an end—that it runs through all matter. Because the Prevail believe the universe will continue after god’s destruction, their considerations are entirely different from ours. When men assume they’ll continue, responsibility is postponed.’

  ‘Listen, what if it made no difference, neither ended it all nor made it better—why do the hit?’

  ‘At the simplest level? Revenge, and honour satisfied.’

  ‘Then death wouldn’t be punishment enough, would it?’

  Lockhart twitched a small smile. ‘You and old Quinas have a lot to talk about.’

  I didn’t like the sound of this—Quinas was a charred moon dropped from the sky, yesterday’s hero gone to margin remnants and remains. ‘I’ve met shamanic burnouts. Some shivering leftover with weird eyes? I haven’t got the patience to hear about some gold-rimmed yesterday.’

  ‘He’s rather younger than I am,’ Lockhart muttered tersely, and I felt like the idiot I was. I loved this kindly gentleman who had been born in the days before our enemy’s existence had even been verified. ‘In any case it’s important you meet him before the big push. And be surprised by nothing you see or hear. He’s ... on the night side of right.’

  I decided I needed a little more recovery time. I’d stripped my gears being something deliberately counterclockwise to my idea of myself—someone out of control. Hip discord wasted my time. But I was the great age for edgework—faced with truth, the young merely fizzed with its acid clarity. They weren’t crippled—they were connoisseurs of the delicate tension between alive and nonalive, the sweet halfway.

  In my cell I watched the colloidal motion in the wall, and asked for stories. I knew books could see people around them, they ground their tiny teeth, tried to rattle like windows, stories to tell. Here were stored Arabian secrets uncynical and sensate, books tattooed in pain-ink, buds turning open, suburb flagstones, broken down gardens, a tin barrow red hot in the sun, insects in the dusk-fluctuating wind flying against shallow water, a mind where river floor scenes flutter unseen, all in the worming walls of the Keep. I treasured the safety here. Dead entrances withstood storms and there were aimless stains of music on the air. Outer platitude galaxies tapped ineffectual at the door. Kneeling to see along two thousand miles of architectonics I found the accumulated density of civilisation, the food chain binding scraps o
f posterity. Society flowed along the vibration, unchallenged and unchallenging. What kind of world was that for a growing lad?

  3 PAINLESS BLOOD, A SECRET

  Originality irritates so obscurely that people may have to evolve to scratch it

  I went through the ivied gate to the locked quarters, a guard allowing entry. Quinas was meant to be batshit crazy and acquitted himself well. He sat at the centre of his cell like an albino frog, working at some obscure cabalistic grid, probably a malice puzzle. Proceeding around him was a polychrome exchange, the walls trancing with sickly refractions. His head was sprouted with white death-hairs, and when he turned my way I saw his eyes were liquid mercury, the surfaces flowing like oily water.

  ‘My,’ he said, ‘people come and go so quickly here. Alix—I’ve heard of you. Dark harlequin, toxic clown or something, yes? Ridiculous that even among our kind we need our little superstars. Sit down. I wonder what they expect me to tell you? Maybe I’m just a warning of what can go wrong, like a mad uncle, eh? Last little initiation.’

  ‘Whatever you like.’

  ‘An open mind? I feel privileged.’ He seemed to consider, his seemingly sightless eyes blank. ‘Perhaps you need to know what’s gone before. The winning side writes the history books, the losers adjust in translation, thus all is homogenised. The Sequel Coming, one messiah eaten by the next. The Internecine Order began with Tagore Ros, who over there in the asphalt world is mainly known for the saying “Say which exists and which doesn’t—the gallows, harmony, yourself.” He knew that genuine power doesn’t have to enforce it by example. Assumed power, on the other hand, requires folks’ belief—it depends upon the victim’s industry. Without that, it ... just sits in a room, referring to itself as authority.’